High speed data networks may be configured to support quality-of-service sensitive applications and/or to enforce service level agreements (SLA). These requirements may be satisfied through use of tight quality of service (QoS) monitoring and traffic engineering mechanisms. Therefore such networks may often be configured to use schedulers and other methods for distributing available bandwidth and/or capacity between users and applications according to priorities, weights, SLA, etc.
In another aspect, one characteristic of adaptive channels (e.g. DVB-S2 ACM) is dynamic user data throughput. While a channel's rate (i.e. the number of transmitted symbols per second) remains constant, user data throughput constantly changes according to the modulation and coding (MODCOD) combinations being used for modulating the transmission carrier signal. User data throughput may change very rapidly in response to a sudden degradation in link conditions (e.g. rain fades over satellite links).
Introducing adaptive channels to high speed communication networks renders simple flow-control mechanisms and/or algorithms insufficient, especially in scenarios of rapid changes in user data throughput. In order to maintain quality of service (e.g. for real-time applications such as VoIP sessions) even when the total user data throughput has been significantly decreased, at least the QoS mechanism has to be constantly informed, in real-time, regarding the currently available user data throughput.